Twenty years since their last full-length release, the Cocteau Twins remain, for many, a gold standard of a band, a group that seemed to have emerged fully formed from some dark, shadowy intersection of Victorian elegance and post-punk moodiness. The Cocteaus’ initial releases –1982’s Garlands album, followed by the Lullabies and Peppermint Pig EPs – were almost proof-of-concept efforts with flashes of inspiration, something also borne out by sessions for John Peel. It’s easy to hear what fed into the dark, overwhelming flow of Garlands – Siouxsie and the Banshees, in particular – but at the same time, the rigid punch of their electronic beats gave them as much of a distinct mark, blended together with Liz Fraser’s understated, unusual vocals. If there’s a standard on Garlands, Wax and Wane is it – the buildup of percussion, Will Heggie’s murmuring bassline then Robin Guthrie’s cascading sheets of guitar sets the stage for Fraser’s still comparatively quiet but nonetheless strong singing turn. It signalled that the Cocteaus had a clear power; what emerged further was the beauty.

Heggie’s departure after the release of Peppermint Pig to form the band Lowlife led to the first of two phases in the Cocteaus’ life, during which Guthrie and Fraser recorded an album as a duo: 1983’s Head Over Heels. It was the perfect rebound: compared to Garlands’ striking but mostly monolithic impact, Head Over Heels demonstrated an easy variety throughout. Fraser’s singing was notably more direct in the mix, even as her lyrics, while often still perfectly understandable, began to shift away from conventional vocabulary towards enigmatic, emotional sound. Meanwhile, Guthrie’s arrangements, expanding beyond guitar and bass, ranged from the jazz-pop flow of Multifoiled to the sparkling, sax-tinged shimmer of Five Ten Fiftyfold to the steady cascade of Sugar Hiccup. Musette and Drums wrapped up the album on a dramatic note – which would become the hallmark of later releases. With the force of Garlands translated into a gripping combination of guitars and drum machine that sounded like waves constantly crashing on the shore, while Fraser sang with commanding, rich tones like an invocation of something from beyond, it was one hell of a marker to lay down.

Elizabeth Fraser talks about why she finds it too difficult to even think about her old Cocteau Twins bandmates

During the recording of Head Over Heels, Guthrie and Fraser participated in the initial This Mortal Coil sessions for their label 4AD, resulting in their cover of Tim Buckley’s Song to the Siren. Those sessions led to an acquaintance with Simon Raymonde, who joined as the replacement for Heggie. The first result was the stellar Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops single and The Spangle Maker EP in early 1984. The three songs featured across the two releases were not only equally striking, they were striking in different ways: The Spangle Maker featured a minimal, tense arrangement that suddenly exploded into a concluding, crashing swoon, while Pepper-Tree was one of their gentlest tracks to date, a serene and exquisite lope that could only be described as sunlight through curtains. But it was Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops that became the band’s biggest track to date, which led to other acts becoming compared to them. The stately pace of the song, in combination with Guthrie’s trademark sound of heavily reverbed guitars that might as well have been bells, that might as well have been keyboards, and beats that punched deep, meant the song sounded like an anthem. Fraser’s soaring vocals, now fully intertwining the easily understood and the utterly incomprehensible, turned it into one.

Having started 1984 on that high note, the Cocteaus ended it on a higher one with the release of their third album, Treasure. If there was such a thing as a stereotypical 4AD album, Treasure might well have been it – Vaughan Oliver’s already noteworthy sleeve designs for the label and the band reached a new height with his combination of colour and photography. It wasn’t an image Guthrie was fond of, and the band members expressed dissatisfaction with Treasure being the product of the trio starting to work together, but for just about everyone else, the album was a start-to-finish triumph. The opening Ivo and the closing Donimo number among the band’s best work, but the remaining eight songs showed the trio’s capabilities to the full, touching on everything from serene, whispered contemplations to exultant, massive-sounding blasts that never so much crushed as engulfed, a drowning in light. Lorelei, the album’s second track, fit within that category, another anthem that sounded like it should be filling stadiums or something even bigger, but strictly all within the band’s own sonic terms: Raymonde’s graceful, powerful bass, Guthrie’s to-the-skies guitar and Fraser at her highest pitched, accentuated on the choruses and the break with a deeper swoop. Treasure inspired what would be one of the 80s’ most over-the-top critical statements – Steve Sutherland’s Melody Maker line “Surely this band is the voice of God” – but with a song like Lorelei, you could see what he was getting at.

1985 found the trio eschewing a new album for three EPs, all of which contain standout tracks. Tiny Dynamine and Echoes in a Shallow Bay, were released within two weeks of each other in November, while Aikea-Guinea surfaced on its own earlier that April. The Tiny/Echoes combination found the band shifting into a calmer mode, away from the sonic extremes that marked Treasure, so it’s no surprise to find that the earlier Aikea-Guinea is, if not a midpoint between the two, a way for the Cocteaus to make sure they weren’t simply trapped in Treasure’s shadow. While songs Kookaburra and Rococo have a brisk energy, the title track suggests a band now fully comfortable with a sound and happy to explore within it. Those sonic elements that had by now defined the band were all present; choral effects, something that had been a part of many earlier tracks, were also here, adding a further depth to the performance. But it’s Fraser’s showcase, singing with a sweet, compelling gentility that doesn’t float away into the ether.

In 1986, the band were again in creative overdrive, only this time in multiple forms – the core trio only released one EP as the Cocteaus, but under their individual names they collaborated with the American ambient pianist Harold Budd on the beautiful album The Moon and the Melodies. In the meantime, Raymonde worked on the second This Mortal Coil album, Filigree and Shadow, resulting in a second Cocteaus album recorded by Fraser and Guthrie as a duo, Victorialand. Raymonde’s absence made for a more dramatic difference than anticipated; rather than simply carry on without him, Victorialand steers away from obvious rhythms and low ends; indeed, aside from guest turns by Dif Juz saxophonist Richard Thomas on tabla, it has no percussion whatsoever. It’s not quite ambient, but it’s definitely not rock’n’roll even by the Cocteaus’ standards, building on the moments of guitar shimmer from the previous years’ EPs, while also stripping back at points to where it’s nothing but a Guthrie guitar line and Fraser’s voice. The whole album deserves a listen, but to single out Fluffy Tufts – one of several song titles that gave the Cocteaus an undue reputation for preciousness – conveys the sense of dreaminess the group could achieve.

The one full-band Cocteaus release for 1986 came in October with the Love’s Easy Tears EP. It had become a bit of a holding pattern for the band. As such, it’s not talked about in such revered terms as many of their earlier releases, and while the band would release plenty of singles in later years, they never released a standalone EP of wholly new material again. But for all that, it’s still the Cocteaus, and one track in particular is my secret favourite. Those Eyes, That Mouth is an almost perfect concentration of the band in big and beautiful mode, Fraser’s singing demonstrating her ease at moving from a rhythmic swoop to a piercing keen while the music builds into a scintillating wash that Fraser almost disappears into as it fades. I don’t know if I’d ever want to pick a song for my funeral, but this is more of a candidate than most.

While the band made its American major-label debut in 1988 with Blue Blue Knoll and scored a US alternative hit with the hip-hop-beat-driven Carolyn’s Fingers, the album as a whole was almost stereotypically Cocteaus in a strange way – a lot of effects and skilled performances but not as many memorable songs. 1990’s Heaven or Las Vegas, which was the band’s farewell to 4AD in the UK, was a different affair all round. Whether it was Fraser and Guthrie becoming parents in 1989, the break from touring, general time for a rethink or more, Heaven was the band’s most accessible and immediate – one could almost say radio-friendly – album to date. Guthrie cut back but never completely removed his famed layers of guitar and reverb, Fraser’s singing was her most comprehensible in years, and both Raymonde’s bass work and the ever-present drum machine provided swing and backbone while pulling back just enough to match everything else. Cherry-Coloured Funk and Iceblink Luck became new standards for fans, while the title track, the album’s second single, was a lovely distillation of the Cocteaus’ knack for a slower but soaring singalong in the newer style, especially on the choruses and the conclusion.

1993’s Four-Calendar Café, the band’s major-label debut in the UK via Fontana, was in many ways the logical product of Heaven or Las Vegas. Not only did the band, now well over a decade since their recorded debut, continue to explore calmer sonic approaches, but the two members of the expanded touring lineup – guitarists Ben Blakeman and Mitsuo Tate – contributed parts as well. Far from indicating smooth sailing, however, stress was starting to affect the Fraser-Guthrie partnership. Guthrie, as he admitted in later years, was battling addiction; Fraser, as she frankly discussed in her 2009 interview for the Guardian, suffered a nervous breakdown, went through therapy and would soon break up with Guthrie. Having been a band whose art allowed for lyrical and emotional projection on to it from the outside, on Four-Calendar Café, Fraser starts grounding all the perceived dreaminess with blunter realities even while the music continued to soar. The album-closing Pur was a lovely ode to Fraser and Guthrie’s young daughter Lucy-Belle, but it’s the single Bluebeard – with its retrospectively telling lyric “Are you the right one for me / Or are you toxic for me?” – that sums up one of the most sweetly sour albums you’ll hear.

After an often fraught tour for Four-Calendar Café – the band’s performances were often striking, with a live drummer contributing for the first time, but Fraser was visibly and audibly not at her best – the band’s releases continued. There were two EPs in 1995, the acoustic reworkings of past songs Twinlights, and the Mark Clifford remix project Otherness, and then another album in 1996, Milk and Kisses. There was a tour, a couple of further songwriting projects and finally, in 1997, the collapse of the band during sessions for a follow-up album. Milk and Kisses is a bit of a retreat to the past – a little more obscure, less lyrically forthright – and as an unintentional final farewell, it’s an elegant if melancholic listen, one that Fraser in particular regards as the hallmark of a sad time. This was underscored in later years by the revelation that the album’s most direct song, Rilkean Heart, was written for and about Jeff Buckley, who she became close to following her split from Guthrie, though the relationship did not last. Given the young singer had already been entranced by Fraser’s take on his father’s work with the Song to the Siren cover and she, in turn, found his music and singing moving, one can sense the high emotions at play in this Cocteaus’ song, one that took on further tragic overtones when Buckley died in 1997.